With success, as would happen throughout his life, Risley quickly faced imitators. By December 1844, Gautier—the same illustrious French critic who had earlier written so glowingly about Risley—was calling him “surpassed,” after seeing three tiny American children named Ohio, Missouri, and Arkansas tossed about by a youth of eighteen.35
Even more serious competition came from another American named Richard Sands. An equestrian, gymnast, and posturist, Sands would one day become famous, among other things, for walking on the ceiling using special shoes. With two beautiful golden-haired “children,” he also appeared in Paris in June of 1845. Japan, still closed to the outside world, did not feature prominently in French consciousness at the time, but China did, for like the British Empire, Napoleonic France was starting to nibble at a weakened China’s borders. In a ridiculously faux-Chinese-themed act called “The Juggler and the Mandarin,” Sands juggled the children on stage with his feet, and the critically promiscuous Gautier fell in love with him, too, calling him Risley’s “teacher” and writing that “the pupil was strong, but the teacher is astonishing.”36
Luckily, Risley was generally acknowledged to be the leader in this new genre of entertainment, as well as its inventor, and other writers usually sprang to his defense. In August of 1845, when describing Risley’s appearance at the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre in Paris, the arts critic of the paper Le Tintamarre stressed that “he is the real Risley, not the fake one we have seen at the Variétés [theatre], named Sands. . . . ”37
Going Global
Risley’s reputation traveled fast, through published accounts and word of mouth. And he began performing in front of more and more exalted people, and also associating with them, for he was now a true celebrity. In the spring of 1845, he visited Russia, performing in St. Petersburg at the Grand Alexandrian Theatre, and in Moscow, meeting with Russian nobility and generals and being awarded multiple medals. Back in London, on January 27, Risley and his boys appeared before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Old Drury Theatre and “had the honour of attracting the especial attention of the royal auditors and their marked approbation.”38 A month later, on February 27, Risley visited and breakfasted with Gansevoort Melville (the older brother of novelist Herman Melville and head of the U.S. legation in England, who would die of illness only months later). As Melville wrote in his diary for that day, clearly impressed:
I was much pleased with the boys & on the whole with the father. He has been 3½ yrs abroad & markedly successful. He played 70 nights at the Haymarket, 110 in Paris, & brought out of Russia with him 65,000 rubles—65 cents to the rouble. He has bought a place near Phila for $33,000 to which he means to retire in about 2 yrs. He is 39 yrs old & a crack shot—5 ft 9 ½ inches high and most symmetrically built.39
Professor Risley and sons, circa 1843–45. Ink with applied color on paper, 14x9 inches, SN1546.134.8. from the circus collection, the john and mable ringling museum of art, the state art museum of florida, a division of florida state university.
Wherever possible, Risley collected autographs of important people in a little morocco-bound book, and in a conscious effort at self-promotion he would often display it to reporters, friends, and even, sometimes, to the general public. Twenty years later, a San Francisco reporter for the Daily Morning Call would marvel tongue-in-cheek:
Hiram Powers testifies to the gratification the performances of Risley and his sons have afforded him, so does Fanny Ellsler, and C. Edwards Lester, and Lord Holland, and the Maharajah of Burdwan, and dozens more whom it would be interesting to publish, could we decipher the crooked chirography of their signs manual.40
Wherever Risley went, he had an extraordinary ability to create stories that tended, in today’s parlance, to quickly “go viral” and to further enhance his fame. In Vienna, where public baths were very popular, it was normally necessary to first pass a swimming test before entering the deep end. Risley and his boys refused and created a sensation by doing cannonball somersaults into the water from the upstairs gallery, an audacious act described a few years later in the normally staid U.S. magazine Ladies Repository.41
Sometimes it was not just what Risley did, but what he said, that made the news. At the beginning of January 1847, Risley and sons made their first appearance at the Theatre Royal, St. Carlo, in Naples, Italy. When the performance ended the family was called out by the audience ten times to appear on stage, at a theatre that held four thousand people and where, according to the correspondent of the New York Sun, they were “reaping a golden harvest” of money. The brother of the King of Naples was so impressed that he called on Risley and, in the course of the conversation, asked him what he planned to do when the children got bigger. Risley, ever the wisecracker, rejoined by asking if the royal recalled the story of a Roman athlete, who “commenced by carrying a calf and continued, by practice, to carry it, after it got to be a cow.”
At a party later held at the local U.S. minister’s residence, Risley’s words generated even more publicity. The young United States was at war with Mexico. While the war was highly controversial, many Americans were proud of their nation’s performance on the battlefield and still sensitive about their relationship with England. Risley thus told a joke about a Yankee and an Englishman discussing the war wherein—after the Englishman questioned Americans’ pluck because of reports of peace offers with Mexico—the Yankee retorted, “Well, I don’t know what our folks have offered to do with Mexico; but, stranger, I’ll jest tell you one thing—I’ll be d___d if we ever offered to make peace with you!” While perhaps not particularly funny to modern readers, this joke so resonated with patriotic readers in the United States at the time that it was reprinted in scores of papers over and over again for the next several years, even in the Manitowoc Tribune in faraway Wisconsin, as late as September 20, 1855.42
Another aspect of Risley’s character that always guaranteed notoriety was his extreme competitiveness and penchant for risk-taking. As noted before, Risley’s trip to Russia in the spring of 1845 was a huge success. As one story goes, since he was known to be a crack shot with the rifle, in Russia he was also asked to enter, and bet on, a competition with the best local marksman. He of course won spectacularly. A gifted skater, he also undertook a competition with some top Russian skaters which he won in an electrifying manner, skating at high speed, leaping over twelve foot holes cut in the ice, and executing somersaults as he did so, repeatedly. Later, when back in London, Risley boasted at a fancy dinner party that he was the best shot, the toughest wrestler, the longest jumper, the finest billiard player, and the farthest hammer-tosser in all of London. Some of his dinner companions took him up on his comments, and found the best men they could in the city. Yet Risley easily won the rifle match and, to unnerve his opponent, “threw up an orange and put a bullet through it, and nicked a piece cut of a penny that was also tossed into the air.” He also vanquished the English wrestler, set a new record in the long jump, and won at the hammer toss. But when it came to billiards—the skill of which Risley was most proud—he was defeated by John Roberts, an English champion. Stung, Risley later brought Andrew Stark, one of the best American billiard players, to London and wagered on his beating Roberts. He lost up to thirty-thousand dollars, an even greater fortune than he had lost in the earthquake of Guadeloupe.43
John K. Chapman & Co. broadside for Risley’s “Panorama of the Mississippi,” when shown at the American Hall in Leicester Square, London, circa 1849. courtesy, the winterthur library: joseph downs collection of manuscripts and printed ephemera.
Despite Risley’s bravado about being able to juggle his sons as they grew older and heavier, he clearly knew what the future held. In September 1847, he returned to the United States and put on successful performances with his sons in New York and,